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THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
I've been thinking about gender a lot recently. I grew up a fairly 'hard line' feminist. Since I was a teenager I've always scoffed at the notion that there were any inherent differences between the sexes. I conceded that men were physically stronger than women, but as I didn't want to be a firefighter, it didn't seem to matter. When I was pregnant with my first child, in my heart of hearts I really wanted a girl. Part of me wanted to sew dresses for a little girl, as I love dressmaking, but the real reason was that I didn't have any frame of reference for bringing up a little boy. I tried to hide these feelings. My husband Graham really wanted a little boy, I think, though it can't have been to have someone to play football with - apart from me, he's the least sporting person I know. When I was about eight months pregnant, my GP (here in England we have most of our prenatal care from General Practitioners and midwives) said to me that she thought the baby was a girl, as the heartbeat was quite high. I had read that there was some scientific basis for a belief that a rapid heartbeat meant a girl, while a slower one meant a boy. I knew it wasn't definite, but I started to hope from then on. (I'd spent most of the pregnancy imagining that the bump was a boy, just to shield myself from disappointment). When the baby was actually born, the short but eventful labour (pre-eclampsia, induction, a failed attempt to insert an epidural, and then it was all over bar the post-partum hemorrhage) drove all thoughts of gender from my mind. When the midwife announced, 'It's a girl!' I hadn't even taken in the fact that it was a baby, let alone one with a sex. Nearly five years later, Tamsin is an absolute delight. When she was born, we were adamant that we wouldn't bring her up in a gender-specific way. We bought her Duplo and a train set, and soft toys instead of dolls. On the other hand, she was a very pretty baby and I delighted in dressing her in smocked dresses and other feminine things, as well as an endless array of unisex OshKosh dungarees (I reckon I keep OshKosh in business, on the export side at least). I was a bit horrified when my pretty tomboy daughter (often to be found hanging upside down with curls flying in the wind) became passionately fond of Barbie dolls at the age of three-and-a-half. I am now resigned to the presence of Barbie in our feminist household, and she does play with Lego and do wild physical things as well. I think I can cope with her being 'a girl'. When Tamsin was two, I conceived our second, much-wanted child. I wanted another girl, and this time Graham did too. We had had such fun with Tamsin that it was difficult to imagine another baby not like her. We agreed that I would have an amniocentesis this time round, and that we would ask for the sex of the baby to be included in with the results. At twenty weeks pregnant we were able to tell Tamsin that the picture she was looking at on the ultrasound screen was her new baby brother. (My baby bruvver, he was known as for some time). It took me five minutes to get over my disappointment at not carrying a girl - the time it took me to walk from the records office, where I had read my file to discover the baby's sex, and seeing the baby on the screen. Seeing him there I knew I loved him every bit as much as his sister. Bringing up a boy might be different, but I was ready for the challenge. Angus wasn't very well at first (more pre-eclampsia, a bit of a drama all round). For six months we were more concerned with his health than anything else. Then he started to put on weight and catch up with the other babies physically, and we were able to relax a bit. There were individual differences between him and Tamsin, but at the back of my mind all those old theories about there being no inherent differences between the sexes were rolling up again. And for a long time I continued to believe them. Then I noticed that Angus's language development was lagging behind what Tamsin's had been like at that age, and behind that of the girls we knew who were his age. I read a bit, and sure enough, boys' language skills have been scientifically proven to develop later than girls'. Humph, I thought. Still, in most other respects he was a lot like Tamsin had been. Very recently, I have started to notice even more changes. He is coming up to 22 months now, and he has developed kamikaze tendencies that even his tomboy sister, always physically confident and adventurous, never had at that age. I knew for sure last Saturday that he was physically wilder than she was at that age. He tried to scoot across the top of a climbing frame built for eight year olds (yes, I know I shouldn't have let him up there in the first place!) and fell through the bars. I caught him, skinning my knuckles badly on the wood in the process. He's fine, my fingers are still sore. Tamsin would never have done that at that age. Everything he does, all of a sudden, seems so much bolder. I have to admit that boys and girls might, just, have inherent differences. I shall watch with intense interest to see what the future holds. My fears about bringing up a boy have receded, to be replaced by a keen sense of challenge. I adore both my children equally, but as well as having their own personalities, I think they are going to prove that boys and girls are not the same.
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